A 23-page Facebook document seen by The Australian outlines how the social network can target ‘moments when young people need a confidence boost’ in pinpoint detail.
Facebook is using sophisticated algorithms to identify and exploit Australians as young as 14, by allowing advertisers to target them at their most vulnerable, including when they feel “worthless” and “insecure”, secret internal documents ­reveal.
A must read.
This is evil. Evil that makes shareholders very happy.
Here's the bril...

A summary of the sinister effects FB Live can have on the murderous and the suicidal.
FB say they remove these feeds quickly. Alas, the murder of an 11-month old girl garnered almost 400k views before the video was deleted (of course it was copied and is still available from many sources).
This is feeding the desire for attention many suicidal murderers seek. It may encourage them to go further than they otherwise would. It's wrong. It's sick. It's Facebook....

Facebook tracks everything you do online, every keystroke, including aborted posts, where you look in videos, where you move your mouse pointer etc., to influence your mood and make you click on more ads, and to sell your data to the highest bidder or use your pics in advertising without compensation, or to sell to Trump's minions to track you down and harass you.
Here's a nice summary of the evil currently perpetrated by FB as a letter that can be sent to FB recruiters:
Dear Recruiter,
The way ...

Total tracking and surveillance of all Internet users for the profit of one company, without anything in return: https://blog.donottrack-doc.com/facebook-tracks-users-even-those-who-dont-use-it-says-privacy-report/...

Through the total insanity of the $19 billion purchase of WhatsApp, Facebook will be enabled to conduct total surveillance of users. FB will gain access to hundreds of millions of phone numbers, making data interpolation easier than ever. This is 1984 coming true. Private conversation will be monitored, analyzed and mined for the benefit of advertisers. And it will all be passed on to the NSA, who will have priority access to your most intimate family conversations.
The nightmare is about to be ...

Once FB gets its hands on a mobile platform (Blackberry may be up for grabs soon), they will control your life:
If Facebook has the phone it always knows where you are. It can push you towards places to eat, drink or just about anything else. All approved by your network (and kicking money back to Facebook).
Facebook is making the web into a wasteland. The real world will then follow....

FB marketing is the least effective way to promote your business, according to Forrester. All those privacy violations and private data for sale in spite of promises to the contrary are futile. The sheep won't care but shareholders may....

Facebook is now allowing teenagers to post status updates, videos and photos visible to everyone instead of just friends. In face of a surge in cyber bullying and a fashion for emotional warfare between teenagers this is a sinister move. But other sites like ask.fm or kik appear to be more hip with teens.
big money is at stake for the company and its advertisers. Marketers are keen to reach impressionable young consumers, and the more public information they have about those users, the better t...

Shallow greed again tops good morals at Facebook: Decapitation videos are now shown and shared without warnings. They had been banned since May, but suits probably told FB to allow them. User pat rightly comments:
I have deactivated my facebook account. If someone films a murder with the intention of posting it online, it is an act of gross disrespect to the victim to watch it and collusion to host it, facebook have lost their moral compass....

The NSA augments data collected by total snooping of phone (1 billion records per day), email, GPS and other data with data sent by Facebook to the NSA:
The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents. They do not indicate...

Kids risk being early targets of advertisers and governments, with no chance of every living in anonymity, thanks to pervasive face recognition:
Last week, Facebook updated its privacy policy again. It reads in part: “We are able to suggest that your friend tag you in a picture by scanning and comparing your friend’s pictures to information we’ve put together from your profile pictures and the other photos in which you’ve been tagged.” Essentially, this means that with each photo upload, Kate’s...

Zuckerberg is wiring the world, for profit:
This latest announcement is an unabashed business decision. Pure and simple and incredibly audacious. With far-reaching and probably very great global consequences. And you’d expect nothing else from the man who has helped to transform the communication and behaviour of the modern world.
But creating a narrative of Zuck and co riding in on white chargers under the banner of altruism is simply vile. Where is any mention of local consultation, where’s t...

Before the NSA disclosures this seemed rather harmless, as Facebook data was supposedly more or less private, i.e. not readily available to the government. Turns out, now government spooks can track you anywhere, past, present and future, because Facebook and other services pass on real-time data to them:
The U.S. government can track where you are, who you’re with, what you look like, and where you’ll likely be next thanks to a tool created by defense contractor Raytheon.
The tool, called Riot...

The Economist has summary of current research into the mood-altering effects of Facebook usage:
the more someone uses Facebook, the less satisfied he is with life.
And here is the root cause, it's envy:
[Researchers] found that the most common emotion aroused by using Facebook is envy. Endlessly comparing themselves with peers who have doctored their photographs, amplified their achievements and plagiarised their bon mots can leave Facebook’s users more than a little green-eyed. Real-life enc...

Facebook will expose users to unquittable video ads lasting 15 seconds, wasting billions of seconds of humanity's time:
The move would also be consistent with the long-term trend toward increasingly pervasive advertising in American culture. Once upon a time, ads in movie theaters were considered controversial. Telemarketing evolved into faxed ads, email ads, web ads, phone ads and on and on.
Maybe some bleating, but the sheep won't mind....

An article sceptical of Facebook from a marketing and branding perspective. Tying your business and your brand to FB may lead to brand dilution and unnecessary tie the user experience to the FB platform. The historical reference to the outcry over Microsoft bundling IE with Windows is spot-out:
A good ten years ago we were worried about cookies and vendor lock-in, today the dumbed-down herd of sheep won't even blink when FB sends all their data, browsing and consumption habits to the NSA and the...

A lengthy article on the history of the Facebook Platform. The Platform is effectively dead after many rule changes by FB. As with many FB/Zuckerberg ventures, the technical execution was excellent, but in the end it was a scam to make an impression with developers, and promises were reneged on....

FB has deleted a call for a rally against the NSA-led, Facebook-supported snooping program called PRISM in Germany and deleted the organizers' account. So: Facebook gathers your data (including your entire browsing history), passes everything it knows about you and your friends to the government, and stifles any opposition against it in violation of free speech. If you're not part of the sheep herd, it's time to delete your account.
Here's the organizers' twitter account: https://twitter.com/Ant...

The FB state of affairs at The Verge:
It's a chore.
“Sharing” was a fad, once cool, now uncool.
At some point, adding these details, like hundreds of photos from a recent vacation and status updates about your new job amounted to bragging — force-feeding Facebook friends information they didn’t ask for. What was once cool was now uncool.
Add to that the recent scandal of FB sharing your personal info with the government (more about that later), and last cool of Facebook may be the cool of a ...

One user experience with a Facebook app (Schoolfeed):
It is precisely these kinds of garbage tactics that app makers should avoid. Not only does it make me despise your service, it sheds ill light on Facebook, as well.
A user comments:
I got an e-mail from a friend today asking me how I know about her school from Japan.
Schoolfeed sent her a message UNDER MY NAME, about her school.
I have since found out that they’ve spammed several of my Facebook friends with messages UNDER MY NAME. I dele...

Facebook has become a (necessary) chore for many teenagers:
The latest Pew Internet & American Life Project study delves into teens’ growing disillusionment with Facebook. It’s still the most popular social network—94 percent of teenage respondents said they have an active account. But growth has stalled year-over-year. With 90 percent market penetration, that’s not unexpected, but many teens revealed that their Facebook habit has become a chore....

A scientific study into the implications of the social graph. It's not the information you “share”, it's the graph that reveals everything about you. Key quotes:
The increasing amount of personal information that can be gleaned by computer programs that track how people use Facebook has been revealed by an extensive academic study.
Such programs can discern undisclosed private information such as Facebook users' sexuality, drug-use habits and even whether their parents separated when they were...

Asks the Daily Ticker:
The company that became a cultural phenomenon by harnessing young people’s zeal for engaging through technology and projecting an online persona has, by several accounts, become passé among many teenagers.
As Apple Inc. (AAPL) has learned, having a ubiquitous, fabulously successful technology product can produce its own backlash as younger, hipper users bristle at their parents’ presence on the same platform.
How can a sheep in a herd of a billion be cool? Add to that yo...

Facebook is killing Silicon Valley, according to an older article by Steve Blank. The social media craze spoils investors and entrepreneurs into shooting for low hanging fruit, scorning real innovation:
If investors have a choice of investing in a blockbuster cancer drug that will pay them nothing for fifteen years or a social media application that can go big in a few years, which do you think they’re going to pick? If you’re a VC firm, you’re phasing out your life science division.
And
It’s...

BR sums up Facebook:
Sure, Facebook is the new Microsoft in terms of being a ubiquitous, evil company run by a snotty little group of shits — hey, come to think of it, where is the old Microsoft on the list?...

Facebook is the top non-utility company and number four on the “10 Most Hated Companies in America List for 2012”.
Facebook has had customer satisfaction issues for some time, but recently did a particularly good job of alienating a portion of its nearly one billion members. According to the ACSI, Facebook is one of the most strongly disliked American companies, beaten out only by three public utilities companies. This comes in part from the company’s continuing user privacy concerns. Mark Zuck...

Facebook has announced the option to pay US$ 7 to promote a post to friends' news feeds. This is nothing to frown upon. Unlike most of FB insidious social graph exploitation and user privacy abuse, this is completely transparent and an entirely legitimate business practice.
It may even be beneficial on the path to monetize the web: Users are getting used to paying for purely digital token services, the next step up for the artificial pigs or whatever crap people buy in Zynga games. The problem o...

FB has known everything you do online for some time now. Thanks to its sagging stock price they now take intrusion and user abuse to a new level: FB now matches online and offline data on a massive scale. Online ads will be targeted at you according to your offline purchases. Here's how to opt out (until FB finds a workaround)....

At least not Facebook. Their brilliant new lock-in feature @facebook.com has destroyed many address books and lost tons of email (or maybe they just placed the email in the “Other” folder, but still synced address books to mostly unusable @facebook.com addresses).
I must admit I'm surprised to see this huge SNAFU. Usually Facebook is sinister and getting worse in terms of user abuse, but savvy in terms of tech and getting better....

Oversharing on social media may be a quasi-sexual experience with intrinsic value and commensurate reward-system stimulation, just like a delicious meal or a sexual contact.
The reward given by a person’s brain when a Facebook posting of theirs is viewed, liked and commented on has proven to be comparable in pleasure to the response from food and sex, according to a recent Harvard University study.
So now you know that someone obsessively using their smartphone for “sharing” is actually quasi-...

FB has given every user a @facebook email address and made this address the default for display on users' FB profile.
"This is a direction Facebook needs to move in - your email is a proxy for your identity on the internet and Facebook want to usurp people's pre-existing email identities with their own to help drive up traffic to its site and** lock users into its service**.
As usual, user's weren't asked or informed beforehand.
It's even more appalling how FB burns its PR shills, having them ...

An interesting take on the “oversharing” deluge of information that will be made far worse by Apple sheep:
I blame it on what I call Zuckerberg's Bubble -- not a reference to the current (and rapidly deflating, thanks to FB's IPO) tech bubble, but to the social bubble Zuckerberg has been living in since his Harvard dorm-room days, when he started monomaniacally coding Facebook into existence. When you're in college, and still trying to figure out your identity, you're almost hardwired to **feel...

A nice essay on the reasons for leaving FB after the complete corporate takeover (aka IPO):
Zuckerberg’s business model requires the trust and loyalty of his users so that he can make money from their participation, yet he must simultaneously stretch that trust by driving the site to maximize profits, including by selling users’ personal information. The I.P.O. last week will exacerbate this tension: Facebook’s huge valuation now puts pressure on the company’s strategists to increase its revenu...

Facebook is killing Silicon Valley and the whole economy while it's at it:
Is Facebook the sock puppet of today’s new dot-com bubble?
[…]
Yes, another 2000 crash triggered by Facebook, the sock puppet of 2012.
But Stoltmann sees through the dark veil of denial that shields most of America:
“Virtually any slip-up in performance by Facebook and the stock will crater.” Yes, “crater,” as in bottom, crash, meltdown. “If Facebook is valued at $100 billion, its valuation would be 33 times its advertis...

BR on Facebook and today's IPO:
No matter how many times I shut off notifications, raise privacy settings, and remove alerts, Facebook continues to send me email. It seems every time they change something, they willfully change my settings and ignore the email address removal. (Really, WhoTF thinks I have the slightest interest in “Sims Social?”)
Hmmm…. Sims Social. Sounds intersting. Gotta have a look.
Anyway good luck to FB for the first day of trading....

FB is testing payment for post prominence, thus breaking the “always free promise”:
I have no problem with post promotion. I have a problem with paid post promotion. If this goes through, it will ruin Facebook.
If you consider that scores of imbeciles pay for virtual pitchforks on Zynga, they might as well pay for post promotion. But smart people will not submit to the suits and Goldman, get annoyed again, and leave....

The FB walled garden is perhaps the biggest threat to Internet freedom.
I agree: Even after FBs eventual decline and failure it will have conditioned many (young) users into using a central portal to get their information, where curated and censored information is all they'll expect to get. This is worse than the AOL of yesteryear as FBs requires a much deeper personal involvement from “members”....

Facebook may be making us lonely, giving users the information age equivalent of a faceless suburban wasteland, claims the fantastic cover story of The Atlantic. Key excerpts:
We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.
At the forefront of all this unexpectedly lonely interactivity is Facebook.
Facebook makes real relationships harder:
That one little phrase, Your real friends—so quaint, so charmingly motheri...

Harsh words, but important insights, destined to be largely ignored by the herd:
"Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record,"Moglen said of the founder of Facebook. "He has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age."
Why? Because, Moglen said, Mark Zuckerberg had harnessed the energy of our social desires to talk us into a swindle. "Everybody needs to get laid,"Moglen said. "He turned it into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality, and he has to ...

Key quotes:
I think the "dot com boom 2.0"has begun. There seems to be so much emotional and reactionary money on the street - especially around this deal. Does no one have a memory of 10 years ago? Valuations based on nothing? Millions spent on vaporware?
[…]
The latest reports is that "boutique"communities are far more popular than the broad appeal of "friending"one fifth of the planet.
[…]
This is more of the same over-hyped dot com crap that people are still licking their wounds over from a...

NYT:
The company’s [Facebook's] flubs in this area [privacy] reveal a fundamental tension in the way sophisticated ad-supported sites work. Consumers’ time and information are effectively the price they pay for free Web services. Facebook allows its users to keep up with far-flung friends and family, for instance, in exchange for that information....

The new no-opt-out Big-Brother-friendly timeline feature is a boon for identity thieves, but also for Facebook and its advertisers:
EPIC’s letter also specifically mentions the Timeline “Health and Wellness” category, which suggests that users should update their profiles with life events related to medical changes. Facebook has partnered with pharmaceutical companies to market drugs and medical treatment to consumers, and EPIC sees a clear—and worrisome– connection.
That IPO is gonna fly off ...

Survey results:
Facebook currently has more than 800 million users. Any company of this size is sure to have some detractors. Compared to other leading social media sites, however, Facebook has the lowest customer satisfaction score from the American Customer Satisfaction Index. The site has repeatedly irked users by neglecting personal privacy. Notable events include the introduction of facial recognition software, which spurred an investigation by the European Union, and the Facebook timeline...

“Without anonymity, the human race will not be human anymore.”
“Ever morning I see people wearing dog collars, reporting their location every 90 seconds to Steven P. Jobs.”
Alas, it may already be too late....

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/12/how-can-i-stop-facebook-following-me-around-the-web/#comments
Great advice and deep info about the the new Big Brother Microsoft, going into IPO year 2012.
Quote:
Friends don’t let friends use facebook……
Nice....

The Economist:
Announcing the agreement, the FTC said it had found a number of cases where Facebook had made claims that were “unfair and deceptive, and violated federal law”. For instance, it passed on personally identifiable information to advertisers, even though it said it would not do so. And it failed to keep a promise to make photos and videos on deactivated and deleted accounts inaccessible.
Alas, as the world has bigger fish to fry than some social network, and politics looks like a s...

Key quotes:
Online corporate snoopers may be getting smarter about you than you are about them. In 2010, a company called The Astonishing Tribe unveiled an app called Recognizr, which let you point an Android app at someone’s face and learn – as fast as your mobile carrier will let you – the online personas they’ve created through public Facebook updates, Twitter feeds, and so on.
[…]
More disturbingly, there are facial-recognition algorithms – developed under the adorably named yet still creep...

FB are topping their stealth tracking of members' surfing habits with the “read” feature, or whatever it's called, rolled out together with the recent timeline updates. Without any clicking or other action by you FB will publish what you're reading and what you've read.
Lifehacker has detailed information on how to stop this nefarious and “scary” new intrusion of users's privacy....

Facebook goes from mining users' data (and selling it to advertisers), to actively shaping users' behavior in the way that FBs “clients” desire.
Facebook, in short, aims not to be a Web site you spend a lot of time on, but something that defines your online — and increasingly offline — life.
“We think it’s an important next step to help tell the story of your life,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, who introduced the new features at the company’s annual conference for developer...

Facebook reads and saves all numbers stored in phones of members using any FB mobile phone app. This includes all numbers stored on the phone, obviously including those of FB non-members. This feature is actually live since February 2010, when it caused some concern. Yes, these numbers are not visible to the public, as is Facebook's standard excuse for its intransparent mining of data. But the database matching your name and your phone number plus the connection to an FB member is owned by Faceb...

Interesting summary of the challenge to FB posted by Google+:
Just like Hotmail was obliterated by Gmail, FB could be threatened by Google's more sophisticated service, especially in terms of “friends” management and video and email integration. And: It may be newer and cooler just as FB was a few years ago when compared to MySpace....

Nah, we're not gloating. FB is a service that is almost necessary and whose technical execution (design, speed, scalability) is simply marvelous. FB truly is a business with a working plan.
But: In the 21st century nothing will last and everything will become a fad sooner rather than later. Pre-modern investors will not make a buck in these post-modern times. Some opinions:
http://www.periscopepost.com/2011/06/is-facebook-fatigue-finally-felling-the-social-media-giant/
http://everythingsysadmin...

Another privacy intrusion stealthily introduced and turned on by default: FB will attempt to recognize your face in all uploaded photos, then “suggest” to the uploading user to tag them with your name. So FB keeps the recognition database anyway and adds situation info to its social graph, but users (still) have to explicitly match the results with names. Here's how to turn this new feature off....

They're building another one, but will the sheep move?
Facebook subjugates our personal information and our digital identities, and then sells us, as products, to advertisers, without regard for our rights, and with no value to us.
Facebook doesn’t just want to own our communications while on Facebook, but is spreading its tentacles across the entire Web with their Facebook Connect login, Facebook Like buttons, and Facebook Comments, making it practically impossible to have private use of the I...

Facebook tracks every web page you visit, even after you close your browser and shut down your computer. The cookie Facebook puts on your machine will log you back in automatically once you open your browser, the the tracking continues. The cookie expires in 30 days:
For this to work, a person only needs to have logged into Facebook or Twitter once in the past month. The sites will continue to collect browsing data, even if the person closes their browser or turns off their computers, until tha...

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/05/facebook-privacy-problems/
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/05/facebook-google-smear/
The privacy violator of the web is not Google, it's Facebook.
Both articles have comment sections that don't use Facebooks commenting system, unlike Techcrunch's
http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/12/karma-is-a-bitch/
and
http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/12/facebook-loses-much-face-in-secret-smear-on-google/
It would be easy for Facebook to censor the comments directed against ...

Of course Facebook never inhaled intended to run a smear campaign against Google.
Even though they hired and paid a top PR firm to pitch negative stories about Google to media outlets and requested to remain anonymous, a practice that would violate FBs own terms of service for users of the site. They even offered to help write those stories.
The "Don't be evil" vs. "All your personal data are belong to us else the vampire squid isn't happy" battle is getting uglier....

About 100,000 legacy FB apps have leaked millions of user access tokens sincd 2007. This data enabled mining of personal user information including profiles, photographs and chat, even if this info was to be protected by privacy settings.
Facebook apps effectively pushed these user access tokens to advertisers as they became part of the HTTP request for the advertisers external resources displayed in an IFRAME. These tokens are still in the open and allow advertisers and other third parties to a...

Research show that social networking does not improve offline friendships. Soliel's comment is excellent: The FB “wall” fosters the shallowest of shallow conversations because of ultimate social control....

http://www.economist.com/node/18483765?story_id=18483765
The move [web sites using Facebook for comment management] also raises fears. Facebook has already accumulated a remarkable amount of data—and not just about its users’ online, but their real-world activities: messages, pictures, calendars, likes and dislikes, even shopping. Now it is adding their opinions too. The result is a giant step towards Facebook becoming, in effect, the repository of identity for much of the internet.** If govern...

Dvoraks view is harsh, sharp, and controversial, as always. The third AOL or the second Second Life, it doesn't really matter. In the end FB will lose its hipness, like a boring skating rink in the suburbs or the local strip mall, minus the convenience advantage since fast, high-quality specialized services are just milliseconds away. This blog does not share Dvorak's view that FB is a ghetto of the technologically challenged, it simply a brilliantly executed amalgam of the current zeitgeist, an...

The problem with the latest stealth demotion (and, of course, exploitation) of members' private data (now including address and phone number) is not that the data is now for sale, it's that the entire (social) graph is now available to paying advertisers, creating a truly transparent advertising target.
The problem with this new “private data for sale” scheme is not that it was introduced stealthily, it's that this covert greed and selling members to the highest bidder is a continuum in facebook...

Two interesting posts:
Facebook to Sell YOUR Posts to Advertisers
Is the Facebook Fad Ending?
Is Facebook a Fad? (Added April 9th 2011)
Facebook feels faddish, oldish, the lustre is gone, the sheen is off. Waiting for the exodus to the Big Green or Red or Purple. Or maybe this time it's indeed different....

Not sure if this isn't a tad alarmist but why leak more information than necessary? And why would strangers need to know the names of your kids or your exact birthday and place? The gold is being mined daily anyway by why throw the nuggets at the Vampire Squid?...

From a review of a book by The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov:
Iranians entering the country were, for example, looked up on Facebook to see if they had links to any known dissidents, thus achieving the very opposite of what American policymakers wanted....

One more reason to be careful with FB: The vampire squid is now involved and it will demand its dues, and this will be your data, sliced and diced, in depth, the entire social graph gold mine. It's not the just face of humanity the Squid is wrapped around, it's** your face as well.** And how cool is it to be a sucker for the Squid's next business model after **all its other scams started failing? ** Of course all risk is borne by the taxpayer, all profits will be a feast for the squid....

http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/29/facebook-now-worth-50-billion-in-secondary-trading/
Not Facebook as such of course, but the social graph gold mine. The herd and “investors” are blowing up a tech bubble of unprecendented proportions.
Comments
glycmoifoa: "Unlike other polls this one found older users to be more privacy-conscious than youngsters. Still, 50% mildly or unconcerned users might just be enough to feed the social graph behemoth."Where I have been able to read about this?...

An interesting take on FB's recent trademark, data portability and other self-importance issues, and their bearing on the overall mediocrity of the service. FB is a mall? Rather, it's walled suburbia, a gated community increasingly employing black-clad thugs (“lawyers”) to defends its mediocrity and monetary interest. The herd feels safe and hip but doesn't realize it gets milked daily.
FB, the new LiveJournal? Eventually. Mediocre? Not as far as their technichal prowess and their marketing savv...

Quotes from the latest issue of the Economist:
Both Google and Facebook are run like absolute monarchies in which hundreds of millions of users (digital serfs, some might say) have created identities. Rather like mercantilist countries in the offline realm, both companies operate policies to protect this asset.
(…) But Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, wants to keep control of its serfs’ data and therefore stops them exporting contacts easily.
(…) Facebook’s position smacks of hypoc...

The FB data mine used for fun stuff, but it will be used for all kinds of other purposes as well:
http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-facebook-status-updates-breakups-2010-11
Yes, FB knows when you broke up and with whom, and possibly why, and probably sold that data to advertisers for targeted comfort food and beverage advertising....

This time facebook applications acted as trojan horses on the users’ computers and sent facebook ids to at least 25 advertising and data firms. All information that is not private can easily be scraped and gathered with the help of the facebook id. Read more on the WSJ site. Here’s how to fix this issue by adjusting privacy settings....

This week's Businessweek cover story is not that pithy and definitely too long, but it has some interesting info about the inner workings of Facebook and its advertising partners. As in the past FB is moving **slowly **in setting up the ultimate advertising datamine, so that most users won't realize they're selling themselves and their friends until it's too late....

Bigbrotherwatch on Facebook
Privacy on Facebook at PC World
Privacy Bewilderment at the NYT
A must read is the lawyerlese epic that is the Facebook privacy statement.
10 Things to Remember about Facebook Privacy
Privacy and Contempt...

Techcrunch’s Jon Orlin takes on the Orwellian dream of Facebook’s location aware services. Friends checking-in friends without their knowledge is especially troubling according to the authors, as for the first time sensitive personal information, you location, is tracked and published by a third party (your “friends”) beyond your control. As usual in recent years, Facebook’s progress depends on risque flaunting of privacy standards, thereby setting new de facto standards. Where you are, and how ...

Half of American social networkers are concerned (27%) or very concerned(23%) about privacy. Unlike other polls this one found older users to be more privacy-conscious than youngsters. Still, 50% mildly or unconcerned users might just be enough to feed the social graph behemoth....

One has a study about how young women (18–34, duh) use Facebook. Notably, the younger group (18–24) are a lot more restrictive with their personal data. And here’s how Facebook changed dating (for the worse?!)....

A bit Luddite for my taste, but here are seven reasons to quit Facebook. This blog does not advocate Facebook deletion and has no bone to pick with Zuckerberg personally. But the article’s points are valid and a good summary of the issues FB raises for personal relationships and privacy....

An interesting takeon Facebook’s (and Apple’s) future. Both need to open up, otherwise they might go the way of AOL. Add to that a certain scepticism of American behemoths in much of the developing world as well as in Europe. When Americans were dominating the web accepting a certain lock-in by a homegrown outfit, the closed system made business sense because they were accepted by the American web majority out of “relative security” concerns. It’s sometimes hard to fathom for Europeans how Ameri...

An instructive article on SmartMoney with these key quotes:
[...] simple test for gauging which information is Facebook-safe. “Would you put it on a sign in front of your house?” she says. “That’s got to be your measure.” (Wired Safety is one of five groups that sit on Facebook’s unpaid safety advisory board.)
“Don’t post it unless you want your parents, the police, predators and your principal [or boss] to see it,”...

Young people are more image and personal "brand"aware than older folk, keeping their Facebook accounts more private and free of compromising data. Their trust in the truthfulness of social networking exchanges is also much lower. So much for the "a new generation seeks to share everything"waffle.
Here's the full report....

The weekly ritual, new privacy settings rolled out. Here's a good overview of FB's recent troubles. Key quotes:
"They've lost the users' trust. That's the problem,"said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group. "In the earlier days, there was time to regain it. It's not so clear now. I think it's getting more serious than making changes and moving on."
"Facebook wants to be the social center of the Web, and any social interaction that ...

This week's Economist:
[compared with Google] Facebook’s problem is more fundamental. True, the
social network has some of the most extensive privacy controls on the web,
but these have now become so complex—and are tweaked so often—that even
privacy experts find them bamboozling. The company also has a powerful
incentive to push people into revealing more information. Facebook
generates most of its revenue from targeted advertisements based on users’
demography and interests, so the more data ...

Creative Commons
You click an ad on FB, FB will send your Facebook ID to the advertiser. MySpace, Hi5 and LiveJournal might send data identifying the profile being **viewed **...
"But FB went further than other sites, in some cases signaling which user name or ID was clicking on the ad as well as the user name or ID of the page being viewed."
It's now a piece of cake for the advertiser to mine your personal data, the data of your friends, the data of friends of your friends. A beginning progra...

Robert Scoble has some suggestions on making fb better, more private, with more privacy-informed users; and here are some more from venturebeat. However, at the heart of fb is a goldmine named "Social Graph". Increased privacy by default will erode the value proposition of the site for business and advertisers. The gold will quickly turn to silver, then copper, then lead, then friendsterium.
P.S. Diaspora is the fast growing open alternative to facebook....

Go to
http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy#!/settings/?tab=privacy&section=applications&field=instant_personalization
and un-check the "Allow"check-box:
The confirm pop-up still advises
Please keep in mind that if you opt out, your friends may still share public Facebook information about you to personalize their experience on these partner sites unless you block the application.
All applications facebook partners with will have to be blocked manually. Follow the steps outlined in th...

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